On the 23rd of April is “la Diada de Sant Jordi”, the Saint George’s Day. This is a very deep-rooted tradition in Catalonia and one of its most special days. While in the past the tradition consisted of men giving women a red rose and women giving men a book, nowadays anybody can give a book or a rose or both to anybody as they wish.
Although is not a public holiday, all throughout the day, Catalan cities and villages are filled with stalls selling books and roses as well as people walking in search of a special book or rose to give away. It is such a very fun and festive ambiance that it is difficult to explain in words; it is best to come here to experience it for yourself!
La Diada de Sant Jordi coincides with International Book Day, which commemorates and honors great authors. That is the reason why you will see the streets filled with bookstalls where famous writers sign their works for you.
This year our center, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, celebrates Sant Jordi with a book exchange among employees at the headquarters building. In order to make it more special, the people that participate have to include an anonymous note expressing what that book meant to them or why they liked it.
Our research group wants to participate in this special day by recommending the reading of two classic books in the fusion field among the book list provided by Fusenet.
The first recommendation is the book titled “Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion” written by Francis F. Chen, one of the pioneering scientists in this field. As the title of the book indicates, it is a complete introduction to plasma physics and controlled fusion that covers single-particle motions, fluid equations for plasmas, wave motions, diffusion and resistivity, Landau damping, plasma instabilities and nonlinear problems. For students, this textbook offers a good introduction to the field; for teachers, a large collection of problems; and for researchers, a concise review of the fundamentals. The third edition contains new material on kinetic effects, including Bernstein waves and the plasma dispersion function, and on nonlinear wave equations and solitons.
The second recommendation is the book titled “Tokamaks” written by John Wessen. This book is a classic on tokamak physics, since serves as an introduction to the subject and a basic reference for theory, definitions, equations, and experimental results. The second edition covers advances in the tokamak, the principal tool in controlled fusion research, as well as the extensive experimental progress in the ten years since the first edition was published.
Feliç Sant Jordi!
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